Season 2, Episode 3: I can Can. Can you?
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
I have something of a morbid fascination with canning. Every book or blog post you read makes it sound like a death trap, so the same way that true crime junkies listen to 911 calls or look up crime scene photos, I look up videos of outrageous canning accidents or weird things found in canning jars. I don’t do either of those things in this episode, but still…
In this episode of Was Is Could Be: The importance of canning in the industrial food movement.
With Special Guests:
Michael J. Lansing is Associate Professor of History at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. A historian of the modern United States, his current book project is Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism—a history of factory-processed grains and the hidden logic that drives contemporary food systems. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as well as commentaries in MinnPost, BillMoyers.com, and Zócalo Public Square.
Derrick Pratt is the Museum Educator and Interim Curator at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, NY. A native of Chittenango, NY, Derrick received a B.A in Social Studies Education from SUNY Cortland and a M.A. in Museum Studies from Syracuse University. Prior to his job at the Erie Canal Museum, Derrick served as Director of Programs at Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum for 3 years. Check out the Erie Eats Exhibit at the Erie Canal Museum.
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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Liz Russell Narration:
Half a cow and a whole pig in a freezer can feed my little family of two for over a year. By the time butchering season comes around, we only have ground beef and a few roasts that we've hidden away just in case of company, but it's all wholly dependent on electricity. The FDA says our freezer should last 48 hours during a power outage. During the winter, I would use snow and ice to try to make that even longer, but a prolonged power outage at the height of summer could probably ruin everything.
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Liz Russell Narration:
And this is where canning comes in; a shelf stable alternative that doesn't require electricity. Remember this clip from previous episodes:
Michael Lansing (Historian):
The three kinds of food that fell into those kinds of first industrial food categories were canned goods, meat, and bread flour. Those were the first food items to be processed in large factory settings. In Western Europe and North America.
Liz Russell Narration:
I had something of a morbid fascination with canning. I don't actually love canned foods at all. I'm kind of a texture eater and it just seems mushy and unformed to me, but it's so fascinating. It's literally food in a jar that's heated and sealed so that it can't spoil for a long time, even if it's meat. But if you read books on the topic, they all make it sound like a death trap if you make even the slightest wrong move. So I was perpetually scared that my pressure canner would explode or that I wouldn't know my jars had botulism until I basically woke up in the hospital. So the same way that true crime junkies listened to 911 calls or look up crime scene photos, I wanted to see contaminated jars or watch them explode just so I could kind of scratch this weird itch and also just understand what I was getting into. It's so curious how canning even came to be and what it meant for the industrialization of food.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
Canning had been experimented with in the 1840s and fifties. It doesn't really start to take off until the 1860s and consumers aren't really seeing things until the 1870s, but canned food becomes a really important category and becomes some of the first industrially processed food. You can think of these labels that we now know from the store like Campbell's Campbell soup. They started canning tomatoes in the late 1860s in New Jersey. Or the Heinz company; they start engaging in forms of industrial canning around the same time.
Liz Russell Narration:
Campbell's and Heinz were exactly who I thought of in my own canning journey. So much so that I actually decided to take one from Heinz's book and start with canning tomatoes. I understood that canning had some upstate New York roots and Derrick Pratt at the Erie Canal Museum agreed during our conversation there, take a listen:
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
To get these food products to places, you need to preserve them. There was salt; however, the issue with salting things is they usually get that salty taste, which people didn't always love. You could get rid of the salt taste from what I understand, but it took a lot of work to do that. Canning, however, was a great innovation, kind of bridging almost the gap between salting things and refrigerating them. So of course, cans are still important today as a kind of food distribution to service these farmers and store their goods, help them more easily transport their goods and help them to reach an even broader market of canneries or to can these goods. And they're all along the canal, notably one here at Syracuse founded by two Syracusians. It’s the Merrell-Soule Canning Company. It was located a block south of the Erie Canal.
And if you go to where the Niagara Mohawk building is today, about a block center, there's a parking lot there now. And a lot of people would know Merrell-Soule and None Such Mincemeat, which was a national brand of mincemeat that existed far after the canal’s heyday. But they owned about 26 factories, I want to say, around the turn of the 20th century, including one where I used to work too, Chittenango Landing right down the canal to the east of us. That Merrell-Soule factory, which the ruins of it are still there, kind of on the grounds of Chittenango Landing Sailboat Museum in the 1890s, they would produce between 50 and 75,000 cans of vegetables a day. And you can imagine that's kind of happening all along the canal and they would process corn peas, beans, tomatoes.
There's an interesting story from that cannery. Merrell-Soule thought that it really struck on something in the early 1890s, I believe, of creating vegetable powders that essentially it would become like instant soup. So they contracted one season just like pumpkins and there's a great newspaper article about these mountains of pumpkins going all the way down the road, which would have been quite the sight to see. But the powders were an abject failure, from what we understand, but still Merrell-Soule had enough interest that they were able to keep the factory going. And it was the largest seasonal employer in the town of Sullivan where Chittenango County is located. It would employ about 250 people. And it was contracting with farmers, I believe it was around a thousand acres of farm land for use in just that one cannery that you might know, Beech-Nut, they're right on the canal there, big factory in Canajoharie. So Beech-Nut they really take off on the canal. I can't speak much to Beech-Nut, you know, they made food products and were on the canal. So canning is huge along the canal, especially, and the later in its history, when tin cans are fully available.
Liz Russell:
Do you think it'd be fair to say that this was the first time, or at least on sort of the leading edge of canning, of processing food in that manner? If you're comfortable with saying that?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
I think canning, once the technology became readily available, everyone was like let's do that. And the Erie Canal always offered a good way to move products. That was the benefit. That's why the canal actually kept existing well after railroads had become the dominant form of transportation. The Erie Canal, while it was slower, was still much cheaper than the railroads. So you could still, if you have goods like canned products which can last for a very long time, you don't need to get it to market right away. You could ship your cans of corn down the canal. It would take a few more days to get to New York City or whatnot, but it would cost you significantly less. So that I think is why canning, I'm speculating here, but I think why canning is sort of prominent along the canal, especially in its later days.
Liz Russell Narration:
Transportation was very much not my issue. When it came to canning for me, it was really the goods themselves. I had no tomatoes to speak of. And while the grocery store certainly did, that hardly offered a lesson in self-sufficiency for me. I bought my seeds for $1.38. I didn't know at the time how such a low price would end up costing me so much. I planted them in the backyard. And while summer persisted, my excitement for hundreds of jars of sauce and tomato paste just grew and grew larger than any tomatoes ever did. By late August, I had a few handfuls of juicy red globes, enough for a few salads, but nothing that would contribute to the canning empire I had dreamed of. Each summer for three summers, I tried to grow these tomatoes. By each fall, our kitchen would be filled with boxes of rejected tomatoes from other farms or gardens, but my own tomatoes never grew.
They just withered. By the end of the third summer, I had successfully canned exactly seven jars of tomato sauce, which we consumed in fewer weeks. I was disappointed. And I wondered if I was a little crazy for caring so much for wanting this homemade life so bad. I had wondered if people in the 1800s had wanted to save their homemade life, or if they were excited to have the help and be able to pawn this work off. I asked Michael Lansing how people thought of canned goods.
Liz Russell:
When they first debuted, how was canning received? Did people think, you know, I'm not going to buy that factory stuff or was it like, wow, this is a great time-saver and I'm very excited about it or somewhere in between.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
Oh, this is an excellent question because a number of historians have been doing work on this transition and focusing on canned goods. The rise of industrial food and canned food in particular raised important questions about what's inside the can. And is it safe for me to eat? If I'm the one who's canning pickles, or canning tomatoes, or canning peaches and it's happening in my kitchen or in my home, or it's my aunt, that's doing it or it's my daughter that's doing it, or it's my uncle that's doing it. Or if it's me making the sauerkraut long before it goes into the can, I know what produced it. I know how it happened. I know that I can trust myself in terms of making sure that it goes into that glass jar and gets sealed appropriately. When that starts happening at a factory, and these products arrive on shelves, they offer a lot of convenience and a host of other things that I hope we'll talk about.
And in that sense, they're very attractive to consumers, but they also present this problem, which is how do you know that the outside, that the label is actually telling you the truth about what's inside. And so that became a really fundamental question for many forms of industrial food that got worked out at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. And here in the United States, it's largely worked out over the question of regulation and the rise of government agencies dedicated to the question of what was called food purity. There's kind of these older ways of knowing what's going to go in your mouth are all kind of thrown topsy turvy with the rise of industrial food and canned food in particular.
Liz Russell Narration:
For my purposes, I was not terribly worried about what was in the jar. I care about what I eat, yes, but my real desire, if we're being honest, was to avoid the grocery store and people. When Michael Lansing told me that grocery stores surfaced around the same period of industrialization as canned goods, I kind of laughed to myself because I was using canning to avoid the very things that canning actually helped make possible. Here's Michael's explanation.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
There's also a shift in where people are getting their food. So there's home production before the middle of the 19th century, of course, and home production continues to be really significant for many Americans. Well into the years after World War II, my own mother grew up on a farm where there were animals around, even though that wasn't what her father was really doing on the farm, he was growing grain, but there were always a few pigs around, always a few chickens. You could get milk from the neighbors and that kind of setting that persists, but it becomes a much less common experience in the 1870s, 1880s, because of all these other transitions that I've mentioned. And so where you get your food starts to change. There had always been kind of general stores of course, or a person behind the counter.
And you kind of talk with them and they sell you what they have. There had also been very particular purveyors like bakers and butchers and the like. The emergence of something that we might think of as a grocery store today is also part of this shift towards industrially processed food. It's part of this new landscape in which the relationships between people and food are rearranged in a multiple set of levels. And this rearranged landscape means that if you're Campbell's in New Jersey and you're canning tomatoes, and then by the 1880s, 1890s, you're moving into canning prepared soup. You're providing convenience, you're providing in some ways, because of scale, maybe a relatively accessible product price wise, but you've also had to figure out how to get that stuff to other parts of the country and how to get it onto the shelves of those general stores and how to convince the owners of those general stores that they should sell it.
And you have to make sure that they get a little profit as well. Otherwise they're not going to put it in their store. So there's a whole kind of landscape of distribution that has to change along with production. So both the production and the consumption of food shifts with this industrialization of processing, when it comes to food and grocery stores, as we know them today, you start to see early things we might call grocery stores at the end of the 19th century. Most of us would have been maybe put off if we went back in time and were told, oh my gosh, this is a grocery store and you go back and it doesn't look like one to me from the 21st century. But by the early 1900, you're starting to see grocery store chains. And that would be more recognizable to somebody in the 21st century in the United States.
The Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, of course, is the most famous of the early chain grocery stores. And these were not necessarily self service ventures. They still had kind of the feel of a general store, but they would have all of these industrially produced food products and they would bring them together across these categories and bring them into one place where you could do all your food shopping instead of going to a purveyor for this and a purveyor for that. And many of these products would not be sourced locally. They'd be sourced from all over the United States or even parts of Europe, or for that matter, parts of Latin America because meat was an important product that was exported out of South America in particular. So these grocery stores are part and parcel of this shift in our food system. And of course they then become a feature of the food system.
That looks a lot more like what we know today. The first self-service grocery store starting to really look like something that we would know, I believe, is Piggly Wiggly in the late 1910s. And this idea that the consumer themselves could go down the aisles and pick out an item and look at it, put it in a basket, or put it eventually in a shopping cart. That's a transition in the 1910s. So even the ways in which industrial food changes the way, not only that foods get processed and produced, but also the ways in which Americans consume food or even purchased food changed dramatically in the same time period.
Liz Russell:
The dramaticness, I don't think that's the right word, but that the amount that that changed occurred and the quickness of which it occurred, you know, looking at time broadly is always amazing to me. And I'd really love to touch a little bit more on why it was able to persist. It feels like during this time, convenience just sort of trumped everything, maybe convenience and quality. And I'm just, I guess it surprises me that a nation that had such ties to agriculture was able to make the shift so swiftly. I'm wondering if you can talk about that a little more and just what people got from this exchange and why they were so bought into this rise of the grocery store and rise of industrialized food.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
The shift as you're suggesting is not one that's just about the economy or just about society, it's about values. So the things that many people who are into food in the United States today value like local, like fresh, like natural or now, we use the term organic. These were not necessarily things that people valued at the end of the 19th century, because fresh could kill you, because natural wasn't always tasty for some Americans, and a lack of access to processed foods could be deadly. So it's important to understand that there's actually a human health component that is easy for us to forget about. Now, I'm not saying that these processed foods were necessarily more nutritious. That's not necessarily the case, but the values attached to food that people had in the 19th century. And they were not dumb. We can't think about them as being less sophisticated than we are.
They were equally sophisticated, but you were much more likely to know someone who had gotten Scarlet fever or typhoid from drinking fresh milk than anybody today. You were more likely to know somebody who had sifted their flour from the local mill and found a weevil than today. A smoked ham out in the barn, you might find maggots in that ham if you had screwed up the process, or it had been mishandled at some point, or if you just left it out in the barn too long. So people had those experiences, they had seen people suffer. They had seen people struggle with the seasonality of food, another thing that we value in the 21st century and is so important today. I want my food not just fresh, but is it in season? Am I eating corn at the right time?
Here in the Midwest, we know that corn is best in August and don't send me any of that Florida corn. I want Iowa corn or Minnesota corn. Right? And you could point to any number of different foodstuffs around the country that people feel passionate about. Why are we getting oranges in July? Or why are there apples in March? Right. So seasonality is really important in much of today's food culture, but seasonality was a problem in the 19th century that factory processed foods helped solve. Now that said, there was a lot of money to be made by processing foods at an industrial scale. And of course, great fortunes emerged from those very companies that I mentioned like Heinz and Campbell's and Swift and Armor and Pillsbury and Washburn Crosby, which eventually becomes General Mills, and a host of other food companies. So there's a question about who's profiting, but that at least explains some of the appeal to these late 19th century consumers.
Once again, there's still this undercurrent of distrust. And so there's a turn away from, Hey, I know the purveyor, Hey, I know that this came from my backyard. Hey, I know that Uncle Jim smoked this ham to, Okay, I'm buying a canned ham. And it's from a brand that I know I've been reading in the newspapers and is seen as high quality. They have advertisements that tell me it's high quality. So marketing and advertising in many ways grows out of the food industry, or at least some of the earliest and most sophisticated forms of advertising of industrial products in late 19th century America come out of the food industry because you have to convince people that it's safe and good, even as they're attracted to it at the same time for these reasons I've outlined. And there's a term in terms of who the authority is.
This is about the relationship I have with the butcher, or is it about some chemist in some lab somewhere who has said this canned ham is okay. And the turn to chemistry at the end of the 19th century and the emergence in the early 1900s of the Food and Drug Administration as an official agency in the federal government, staffed in no small part by chemists who are trying to sort out and then regulate industrial food. That becomes an important piece of the puzzle too, because then consumers can start to really trust what's in the package. They can trust what's under the butcher paper that comes from Chicago. They can trust what's in the flour sack. They can trust what's in that jar from Pittsburgh, because it's been deemed regulated by chemists. And the authority around who gets to determine what is safe and good shifts from regular people doing regular daily activities, with people that they know, to bureaucrats, scientists, regulators.
Liz Russell:
You know, you're saying trust a lot. And it's funny, I don't think a lot of people associate government and trust as words together all the time, you know, without really going down all these crazy rabbit holes. Was there a sense that a government agency was the one to trust on this topic? It sounds like you're saying that it was.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
Oh, absolutely. You know, the 1890s and early 1900, it's a time in American history that historians often refer to as the progressive era. And the progressive era is an era in which there are a number of middle-class people that see all the excesses of this rapid industrialization and all this rapid demographic change, the immense numbers of immigrants coming to the United States from all over the world. The rapid shift of people from the countryside to cities, the kind of haphazard growth with these cities, the immense profits being made by a very small number of people in these big factories. All of these changes are intense and they happen in a short amount of time. And so starting in the 1880s and 1890s, a number of reformers go to work on fixing what they see as America's problems. And these reformers work through civic associations and through local state and federal governments to affect change.
And in that process, there's a real deep investment in for instance, in government and governance, as a way to tame the excesses of this rapid industrialization and some of the downsides of it. And this is very true of food because if you have what is seen as an impartial kind of specific investigation into the quality of that product, industrially processed food product, you as a consumer might feel like the government is actually doing work. That is good for you. Like I need someone who can do this because I've never been to Minneapolis. I've never been inside one of those factories, maybe they're putting sawdust in the flour. That had been a long, long standing problem in flour that you would get from your local purveyor, going back centuries. It's so easy to adulterate flour or to adulterate canned goods or any number of things.
So if I have somebody from the government and by the way I elect politicians and it's the money made from taxes and Hey, they're making sure that this is safe. This is okay. That's great. To be sure a company had to make sure that it kept a good reputation and regulation could cut both ways on that. But it's why so many products are advertising in the 1880s and 1890s. So many industrial food products from across these categories and from others are talking about how many metals they won at a competition. Even here in Minneapolis, the flour made by Washburn Crosby is called Gold Medal Flour. You can still find it on grocery shelves all over the United States in 2020. The reason it's called Gold Medal is because it was a form of marketing. It was like, Hey, we won gold medals as the best flour in the world, right?
So companies can use marketing and advertising to ensure that more and more trust is built with consumers. But boy, government regulation is a huge piece of this too, especially because the ways in which food is processed, where it comes from, all those things become much more obscure. The food processing can happen at a great distance, which was also a shift from the beginning of the 19th century. So what's going on a thousand miles away where they're making this product, the government has the ability to oversee that. So the emergence of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906, very important.
Liz Russell Narration:
Well, I appreciated the rise of the FDA was helping ensure that canned goods wouldn't kill me and that my own dabbling in canning could lead to less than desirable results. I still really craved this rustic experiment. So I researched and I researched and I researched and I researched and it turns out our yard was simply not designed for tomato plants. It was a tiny beauty of a backyard. One quarter acre that butted up against a forever wild area. And there were three or four black walnut trees that filled the space, which made for a total canopy and also insanely toxic soil. Black walnuts produce juglone, a particularly poisonous substance that hangs out in the soil and kills things like tomatoes. And the foliage, while beautiful, would just never allow sunlight to get through to my tomatoes, which they required. So my $1.38 in tomato seeds, which I bought annually, really only taught me that my yard was designed to kill everything. So we had to get a new one.
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Liz Russell Narration:
Next time on Was Is Could Be, the big move. To find more from Michael Lansing, check out Augsburg University's website, augsburg.edu. To learn more about the Erie Eats Project, head to the Erie Canal Museum in downtown Syracuse, or check out eriecanalmuseum.org/erie-eats. And don't forget to follow Eleanor Barnett on Instagram, @historyeats.